8/28/2017

This phrase always seems relevant, doesn’t it? The latest example of its relevancy came on Friday night. Hurricane Harvey was making landfall, and having experienced our own hurricane less than a year ago, I wanted to keep up with this one as events occurred. So, the TV was turned on and we jumped around various news/weather channels, and of course, we also dug down online to find anyone broadcasting directly from the Gulf Coast Texas area.

The most erroneous assumption we made both this time and during Hurricane Matthew was to tune into The Weather Channel first. The Weather Channel is the absolute worst place any one can go to get current, on-the-ground information. Their routine was exactly the same both during Matthew and Harvey. Two or three people on the ground at a location they never leave, and some studio folks. They bounce back and forth between them and repeat themselves, ad naseum. Once you’ve seen about 5 minutes of their coverage, you don’t need to see any more. It just cycles.

The web was the place to be to watch this come in, real-time. Advances in online technology have us in a place where folks can now broadcast live from their own homes. We scoured the usual places for any live feeds we could find. Of those we saw, the most compelling was the live stream run by storm chaser Jeff Piotrowski. His live videos were one of the most riveting things I’ve watched all year. I distinctly recall saying to Mike, after the roof of the carwash Mr. Piotrowski was sheltering in blew off, “Are we prepared to watch this guy die live on the internet?” It was so intense watching it, I actually found myself getting out of my chair and standing anxiously (like my brother does during hockey games lol). We watched the view count and it never reached more than 50-60k people watching. It was an oddly intimate experience for the internet (and the reason only a small handful of us understand why The Blue Shed twitter feed exists). Mr. Piotrowski still has the videos from his live feeds on his twitter account. Worth watching.

This is where we are in 2017. I don’t trust the mainstream news much anymore. I don’t trust second hand sources, really, much at all anymore. However, as it stands right now, I can trust live video. I can trust that it will be raw and uncensored. I can believe it when I see it, if it’s live. I realize that as tech advances, this won’t always be true. We will eventually have the ability to fake live video too. As it stands in 2017, live is trustworthy. Live is uncensored. Live is real.